Burden of Proof

In this post I intend to start of with the common atheist truism that those who make assertions of gods or supernatural forces have the burden of proof to show that their claims are valid, that is at least as far as they expect other people to accept their claims.  Then I want to extend this to an ethical question: the assignment of blame.

It seems valid to place the burden of proof on the one making the assertion.  There are all sorts of ideas that people can and do come up with regarding the supernatural and not much in the way of methods that we might use to test those ideas.  If we adopt the policy of accepting all these claims until we are able to come up with evidence to the contrary, then we will end up with a mishmash of mutually contradictory ideas.

In ethics people want to assign blame.  They will make all sorts of assertions that conduct is blameworthy.  The burden is on them to show that it is.  The reason here is somewhat different.  Blame is an inherently harmful activity, at least as far as the blame is successful.  But in another sense it is the same.  People who make an assertion want others to accept it. Likewise, those who blame someone else for something that they have done will need others to accept that blame is merited.  Unless it is, the blame will be unsuccessful.

Let's look at altruism.  Altruism has many different definitions.  Some see it as being nice to others.  If people want to ethically support this form of altruism, there are no reasons why we should object.  We have good reasons for wanting to encourage people to help others and discourage them from harming others.  This is another definition of altruism.  The belief that helping others is commendable.  I had to be careful here.  There is a closely related belief that helping people ought to be praised.  This statement is ambiguous since it could either mean the same thing or that there was some moral obligation that someone had to praise people for helping others.

This brings us to a third definition: that altruism is the belief that people have a moral obligation to help others.  This is more controversial.  Anyone making such an assertion has the burden of proving it.  It is not sufficient to say that by helping others we make the world a better place, since getting people to help others can either be accomplished by praising them for doing so or by blaming them for failing to do so.  If we want to argue that this is an obligation we should have to show that this blame makes the world a better place and not just the action that we want to encourage.